Your best friend and you - Multi boxing

A couple of weeks back Blizzard released their new “Recruit a friend” program. By recruiting a friend you will get a free mount, bonus experience (300%) when questing together and be able to pass levels to the lower level player. If you can find a friend to recruit or have a someone lined up to join you in your gaming this is a great offer which should help you really speed though the levels.

However arising from this is a lot of discussion about multi boxing. This is a completely legitimate way to alter your play experience that can be as simple (well not that simple) as running wow twice on your computer and leveling two characters at once or as complex as controlling 46 characters between two people. Motivated by a desire to get myself a cool mount and some curiosity I decided to look into what exactly was entailed in multi boxing and how/why you would do it. In the process I unearthed some interesting examples.

The 47 computers you see in the picture to the right are used by two people to control 26 characters each. These two could field a whole AV team, two raid groups or just dominate any zone they wanted. It appears that he started multi boxing in Everquest and only when his girlfriend started multi boxing did decide to go all out. The pair have put a serious amount of cash and time into this setup. The articles I found about them if you are interested in more pictures and info are here and here.

There is also the story of the 5 shaman controlled by two players that are taking the arena by storm. This very successful team is run with one player controlling 4 Elemental Shaman and a second player keeping them alive with a restoration shaman. This season they seem to be doing reasonably well (from what I see on their Arena team page). They gained fame when Wow Insider did an article on them, you can view it here.

What about two of you multi boxing five players then running Karazhan with two people? Apparently it's possible, these guys managed to down (at least some of) Karazhan between the two of them. The again I suppose successfully coordinating all the characters in a raid is only as hard as actually building your setup by hand. Another example of a dedicated couple with what appears to be too much spare time; then again I am using my spare time to write this article.

One thing that seems to come up a lot is “why?” Well I can see several reasons, firstly, is the challenge, it’s quite a project to build and successfully run 4+ characters at once. It requires skill, knowledge and patience. Along with that is the bonuses for leveling with your ‘friend’, 300% makes for some speedy leveling and means you can get to endgame easier and faster. The third thing would have to be ownage, in PvP a multi boxer can make a big impact. Communication will win or loose a battleground and a multi boxer is the pinnacle of communication and coordination. When played right they are a force to be reckoned with. If you do the maths, 5 chain lightings cast exactly at once on the one target are pretty much guaranteed to kill what ever was targeted and seriously messed up anyone near by.

An ironic twist to multi boxing is that it is only legit if all the accounts are yours. If your mate stops playing and gives you his account then you are breaking the rules and you can bet that warrior who just got double POM pyroed will complain.

Personally I thought it would be new and fun, and when I eventually get a new computer might look into trying it. I don’t think I have the coordination to track and control 5 characters but I could manage two especially if they were the same class.